Study
of Over 1 Million People Finds Intriguing Link Between Iron Levels And Lifespan
By David Nield, SciencAlert
July 17, 2020 -- A massive new study has
found evidence that blood iron levels could play a role in influencing how long
you live.
It's always important to take longevity
studies with a big grain of salt, but the new research is impressive in its
breadth, covering genetic information from well over 1 million people across
three public databases. It also focused on three key measures of ageing:
lifespan, years lived free of disease (referred to as healthspan), and making
it to an extremely old age (AKA longevity).
Throughout the analysis, 10 key regions
of the genome were shown to be related to these measures of long life, as were
gene sets linked to how the body metabolises iron.
Put simply, having too much iron in the
blood appeared to be linked to an increased risk of dying earlier.
"We are very excited by these
findings as they strongly suggest that high levels of iron in the blood reduces
our healthy years of life, and keeping these levels in check could prevent
age-related damage," says data analyst Paul Timmers, from the
University of Edinburgh in the UK.
"We speculate that our findings on
iron metabolism might also start to explain why very high levels of iron-rich
red meat in the diet has been linked to age-related conditions such as heart
disease."
While correlation doesn't necessarily
mean causation, the researchers used a statistical technique called Mendelian
randomisation to reduce bias and attempt to infer causation in the
data.
As the researchers note, genetics are
thought to have around a 10 percent influence on lifespan and healthspan, and
that can make it difficult to pick out the genes involved from all the other
factors involved (like your smoking or drinking habits). With that in mind, one
of the advantages of this new study is its sheer size and scope.
Five of the genetic markers the
researchers found had not previously been highlighted as significant at the
genome-wide level. Some, including APOE and FOXO3, have been
singled out in the past as being important to the ageing process and human
health.
"It is clear from the association
of age-related diseases and the well-known ageing loci APOE and FOXO3 that we
are capturing the human ageing process to some extent," write the
researchers in their published paper.
While we're still in the early stages
for investigating this association with iron metabolism, further down the line
we could see the development of drugs designed to lower the levels of iron in
the blood -- which could potentially add extra years to our lives.
Besides genetics, blood iron is mostly
controlled by diet and has already been linked to a number of
age-related diseases, including Parkinson's and liver disease.
It also affects our body's ability to fight off infection as we get
older.
We can add this latest study to
the growing evidence that 'iron overload', or not being able to break
it down properly, can have an influence on how long we're likely to live, as
well as how healthy we're likely to be in our later years.
"Our ultimate aim is to discover
how ageing is regulated and find ways to increase health during
ageing," says Joris Deelen who studies the biology of ageing at
the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany.
"The 10 regions of the genome we
have discovered that are linked to lifespan, healthspan, and longevity are all
exciting candidates for further studies."
The research has been published in Nature
Communications.
No comments:
Post a Comment